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I am learning REGEX and this tutorial I am using says that in place of commonly used character sets I can use short forms
eg:- \d is short for [0-9]
OR
\w stands for "word character", usually [A-Za-z0-9_]

This doesn't seem to work for me in Textpad. I have tried with the Posix option both on and off.


Any ideas?
Thanks

The RegEx syntax used n TextPad is different from the one used in your tutorial.

Check out the TextPad Halp for "Regular Expressions" and "How To Use Regular Expressions".

The regular expression engine in TextPad doesn't have as much power as you will find in modern libraries. I tend to use a site like http://regexlib.com/RETester.aspx as a harness for testing my expressions


From the help under Character Class Operators

"These can be used as an alternative way of representing classes of characters. For example, [a-z] is equivalent to [[:lower:]] and [a-z0-9] is equivalent to [[:lower:][:digit:]]. (Note the extra pairs of brackets.)"

Thus, after checking Regular Expression on your search, \w would be translated as [[:word:]]

If you are using TP's regex, you will most likely want to make it use Posix syntax so Configure, Preferences, on the Editor tab, check "Use POSIX regular expression syntax"

Thanks guys. My intent is to use my new knowledge in php eventually. Was using Textpad as a learning tool. The tutorial recommended to download editpad but I already had Textpad, so I thought I'd go with that.

I Just opened up a large text file and try various search strings to see how it behaved.
I do have the POSIX option on, something I discovered after I started to play with it.

And as you say [:blah:] does work like the \d and \w but is still a darned sight longer to type!